This is the first installment in this year’s series of previews of breweries pouring at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival, which opens Thursday, Sept. 24, in Denver. We’ve invited beer writers from across the country to weigh in on the GABF 2015 regions. We’ve also asked everyone to throw in a few wild cards — breweries from anywhere in the country they want to check out.

Ryan Brawn is the author of HoppyBoston.com, a New England focused beer blog. He lives in the Boston suburb of Watertown after previous stints in Connecticut and Maine, and has a long term goal of visiting every brewery in New England. You can follow him on twitter @HoppyBoston.
Here are Ryan’s picks:Read more…

Back in spring 2012, I attended Avery Brewing’s annual Strong Ale Festival in what is now the former Avery building in Boulder, a barrel-lined labyrinth with amazing finds up and down the aisles and a crowd of informed beer drinkers.

On more than one occasion that day, I was stunned that people actually came up to me and knew who I was.

The First Drafts blog at that time was about four months old. We had formed as a collective, a group of Denver Post journalists whose day jobs were as disparate as writing about courts, city hall or anything that needed doing. Our common ground was a strong-bordering-on-obsessive interest in excellent local hand-crafted beer.

A lot of folks in the brewing industry hold down other jobs, and the guy behind the bar at Denver’s newest start-up neighborhood brewery can tell you a thing or two about insurance.

Don’t worry – Matt Hughes will not try to sell you on the benefits of term life insurance. The head brewer and co-owner of Goldspot Brewery provides insurance risk management for the brewing industry as part of his job with a brokerage firm, with a number of Colorado clients.

Opening at noon Saturday at 4970 Lowell Boulevard in northwest Denver’s Regis neighborhood, Goldpot aims to offer consistent “properly made beer” and a range of styles brewed on a 7-barrel system.

Kim Collins, the new head brewer at Barrels and Bottles (provided by Collins).

Kim Collins got a toehold in professional brewing with an apprenticeship – a fancy way of saying she spent three months getting up when it was still dark to clean equipment and pitch in wherever needed without drawing a paycheck.

That experience at Tommyknocker Brewery in Idaho Springs led to paid gigs, first at Boulder Beer Company, then Epic Brewing in Denver, and finally as head brewer at Barrels and Bottles in Golden. She started this week at the seven-month-old brewpub.

From the continued excellence of established brewers to the maturation of more recent arrivals and impressive 2013 debuts, the state of craft beer is something to behold.

Below, we’ve listed our favorites from 2013. We couldn’t make it everywhere and try everything so there are no doubt misses here. But the following 30-plus beers from Colorado really stuck out in our minds …

Wynkoop’s barrels will soon have a new home – which will make Andy Brown happy (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

Denver’s pioneering Wynkoop Brewing Co. is planning to renovate basement space at its LoDo home that is now home to the Impulse Theater, making room for an expanded barrel-aging program and a tasting room to show off its recent move toward more experimental beers.

Wynkoop head brewer Andy Brown said he wants to build “a nicer, classier space” for tastings, tours and more, and take advantage of the space to build a more ambitious barrel program. He said the renovation will allow the brewery to bring in foudres, towering oak barrels it will use to create sour beer.

“It’s going to be really cool,” Brown said. “It keeps me interested and challenged, and lets me make a lot more different styles of beer, which we are trying to do here. And sour beers are all the rage.”

Colorado’s pioneering brewpub wasn’t exactly gathering dust in LoDo, but a recent push by Wynkoop Brewing Co. to add to its roster of beers and put them in more people’s hands is paying off.

In a blog post this week, the Wynkoop revealed that outside sales of its self-distributed beer is up 80 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year. Overall sales are trending up, too. Marketing man Marty Jones said Wynkoop sold 3,800 barrels of beer last year and is on pace to hit 4,200 in 2013.

Jones attributes the outside sales growth to an improving beer list (and thus, its brewers) and work by its sales and distribution staff.

All this happened, more or less. The beer parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

As the story goes, novelist Kurt Vonnegut and Governor John Hickenlooper’s father were buddies. Vonnegut, the grandson of Indianapolis brewing magnate Albert Leiber, also became pals with John. And, somewhere along the line, an old Vonnegut beer recipe changed hands.

That recipe –which later became named “Kurt’s Mile High Malt” – has only been brewed twice before at Wynkoop. And now it’s being released again, debuting at the one-night-only Breakfast of Champions Beer Dinner on April 11.

[media-credit name=”provided by Breckenridge Brewing” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] Renderings of the front door of the latest Breckenridge concept, in FoCo

Breckenridge-Wynkoop LLC’s first restaurant in Fort Collins will be called The MainLine – and don’t expect a burger-heavy menu when the giant renovated space opens in Old Town early this summer.

The restaurant will be a customized version of the company’s “ale house” concepts in Denver and Grand Junction, which feature pub fare and craft beer from both the two featured breweries and guest taps, Breckenridge-Wynkoop concept director Lisa Berzins Ruskaup wrote in an e-mail.

“When we choose to do an ale house, it is always created in the context of the community needs and wants,” she wrote. “During our due diligence, we heard loud and clear that FoCo didn’t want another craft beer pub with a beef-heavy menu. As a result, we will emphasize other fare, including vegetarian entrees.”

[media-credit name=”Provided by Wynkoop Brewing” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] Yes, that is what you think it is.

Another chapter in one of Colorado brewing’s greatest marketing success stories in recent memory will be written Monday, when cans of beer containing bull testicles become available for purchase.

Wynkoop Brewing’s Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout began as an April Fool’s prank, then became a reality when the pioneering LoDo brewpub actually brewed it in the buildup to last year’s Great American Beer Festival.

Our new iPad app serves as a guide to metro Denver’s bountiful breweries, beer bars and bottle shops, the holy trinity of craft beer enjoyment for followers and fans. Download the app for iPad .
Next time you head for a beer in Boulder, don’t forget your friend, Beers of Boulder and Boulder County, an iPad app from the Daily Camera. Download the app for iPad .

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In Colorado, our pint glasses overflow with excellent beer. New breweries, new batches, festivals every other week. How lucky are we? First Drafts is The Denver Post's beer blog aimed at helping you keep tabs on the state's ever-expanding craft beer culture. We offer a mash of news, event coverage, homegrown stories, tasting notes and tips to help you imbibe. Expert drinker or homebrewer? Let us know what you're loving about Colorado's beer scene. Not sure exactly what a firkin is? No worries, let us be your guide. Go ahead. Belly up and drink it in!